HOME FRONT; The Latest Dish, for Four-Legged Friends

By Joseph P. Fried

Published: July 9, 2006

MICHELLE LEWIS had cooked some chickens and had broken the meat into small pieces. Now she was cutting fresh squash, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and celery into even smaller pieces, which she would briefly boil. She would later mix everything together, along with safflower oil, flaxseed oil, coconut oil, brown rice and hard-boiled eggs and their ground-up shells.

''Healthy food,'' she said, though she allowed that some people might be put off by the idea of the eggshells, even if that addition, for calcium, could not be detected in its powdery state.

But that was beside the point. Ms. Lewis was not cooking for people. She was in a commercial kitchen in Brooklyn on a recent day, preparing a batch of her start-up company's product: handmade dog food with human-grade ingredients, natural nutrients and no chemical preservatives.

Ms. Lewis, 43, has invested $30,000 of her own money and much effort over the last two years in the proposition that there is a profitable place for her in America's huge pet food industry, even if only as a minnow in an industry dominated by whales.

Now she has reached the point where she may soon receive the first indications of whether her very high-end food will find a profitable niche among the more than 600 companies producing dog and cat food in the country.

The batch she was recently cooking was for her first shipment to her first, and so far only, outlet, a Brooklyn veterinary clinic that sells pet food. Last weekend, she sent the clinic 40 pounds worth of two of her meals, chicken with vegetables and salmon with vegetables, to be sold for about $7 for a one-pound container and $11 for two pounds.

By contrast, a 13.2-ounce can of Alpo Prime Cuts in gravy was priced at $1.05 at a Brooklyn supermarket last week. Alpo is produced by Nestl?urina PetCare, whose brands accounted for 30 percent of pet food sales in the United States in 2004, according to a study of the industry.

The study, by Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, found that with Nestl?urina in the lead, seven large companies had an 86 percent share of the market.

Acknowledging the high price for her offerings, Ms. Lewis said she would promote them not only as full meals, but also as toppings on standard dog fare, which would at least cut the consumption of such fare.

''I hate the word 'gourmet,' '' she said of her meals. ''I prefer 'healthy food.' ''

Ms. Lewis, a Brooklyn resident who also works as a relocation consultant, said she decided two years ago to turn her practice of feeding homemade meals to her mixed terrier and English sheepdog, Scooter Mae, into a commercial venture called ScooterFood.

''I thought I'd have it out on the market in two months,'' she said of what seemed like a fairly simple project: cooking food and getting it placed in store refrigerators and freezers for dog owners who believe that the preservatives and offal in mass-market dog food are harmful to their pets -- and that even the higher-end commercial brands are inferior to human-grade food. Commercial producers say their products meet the animals' complex nutritional needs.

Her own research into those needs was easy, said Ms. Lewis, who, among other things, already knew that not everything people ate was good for dogs, which is why she prepares separate meals for Scooter Mae. But moving ahead on other fronts was more intricate. She learned, she said, that to sell her meals commercially, she would have to have them analyzed for percentages of protein, fat, moisture and the like, and put the information on the packaging.

She also learned that she could not call her meals anything she wanted. ''Salmon with vegetables,'' for instance, has to have more salmon than vegetables, ''otherwise it's salmon dinner or salmon-flavored,'' she said.

Nor had she known, she recalled, that she would have to register her meals with the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, and use a commercial kitchen, which is subject to city health inspections.

''I had to hire a consultant because I couldn't keep it straight,'' she said.

Now seeking outlets beyond her first, the Hope Veterinary Clinic in Boerum Hill, Ms. Lewis said she was optimistic because people increasingly ''want better food for their dogs and cats.''

Photo: PET CHEF -- Michelle Lewis preparing handmade dog food in the kitchen space she rents in Brooklyn. She started ScooterFood, named for her own dog, two years ago. (Photo by Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)